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Heiner Goebbels’ Walden sculpts a set of musical landscapes after the eponymous novel by 19th century naturalist Henry David Thoreau, a grandfather of both modern environmentalism and civil disobedience. Thoreau's experiment of living by Walden Pond — where civilization appeared only as the distant sound of a railroad — propagated a radical, solitary, spartan individualism promising a simple harmony with nature.

Conceived as a counterpoint to the metropolitan images of his earlier work Surrogate Cities, Heiner Goebbels originally composed Walden in 1998 for the Ensemble Modern Orchestra (the ensemble version on this disc dating to 2008). But Walden drifts away from a traditional orchestral soundworld, relying on a number of specially-built instruments to create vibrant and unreal sounds, principally the 'steel cello' and 'bow chimes' designed by American painter, sculptor and musician Bob Rutman, to whom the work is dedicated.